[Sigia-l] Taxonomy open to all - was: Difference between Taxonomiesand Classification / Classification Schemes

[gunnar]

> > I would think a system that allowed anyone to add a term wouldn't be an
> > efficient way and you are right that is would become unusable after a while.
> 
> Be careful generalizing like that. You'd think a system that allowed
> anyone to add or edit any webpage wouldn't be efficient and would become
> unusable, and you'd be wrong in many cases.
> 
> (I have a soft spot for bottom-up as well.)
> Peter


Peter,
You and I have both seen good examples of community systems with open access
to content maintenance (IA wiki for instance).
And we both like bottom up thinking.
But my reason for asking the question about totally open taxonomy maintenance
is to get arguments pro and con this phenomenon - which (at least to my
superficial knowledge) in some senses contradicts the idea of a CONTROLLED
vocabulary. I'm aware that a controlled vocabulary may not have a central
controlling authority as such, but have no good examples of a controlled
vocabulary controlled by a vast community of users. The closest to it, that I
can find would be Wikipedia - which is an encyclopedia, and thus have some
characteristics in common with a controlled vocabulary.
I'm simply curious. Can we find a good example of a very open approach to
building and maintaining a taxonomy?
And can we find an example which is so open that it can hardly be called
controlled.

I have seen a very open example in the game Blogshares (www.blogshares.com)
 - which has build a hierarchical system of categorizing blogs. This system
has been community driven, and has had its ups and downs. I just don't find
the result very successful.

I'm careful here - really. I think I know enough about social dynamics in
communities, and about taxonomy systems and controlled vocabularies to air an
opinion, but I'm not sure about how to make an open and vast community build
its own taxonomy. I'm not sure how one can make it work. My intuition tells me
it's NOT easy - if possible at all. But I would sure like to be proved wrong.

When we - in the next few years - see distributed social networking systems
arise - and see the semantic web with shared taxonomies come into existence,
how will we make these systems work together?
I'm aware of ontologies and of some of the efforts done to make taxonomies
interchangable. But how feasible is it to build this - when most people
actually do not know the first thing about classification?

I'm ranting here. Asking questins and being far from coherent. I posed the
question - and probably sounded like a real newbie - simply to get some ideas
and some input.

I still hope to get some more...

:-)

Gunnar Langemark
gunnar at langemark.com